Again with thanks for the pointer to Richard, the foldaway panels on A9 provide a very nice way to organise a lot in one interface.
Archive for September, 2004
Foldaway Panels for Putting a lot in one Interface
Friday, September 10th, 2004Universal RSS Aggregator Interface
Friday, September 10th, 2004Imagine an interface where all manner of interactions and notifications are viewed in a single context with flexible filtering.
The Timeline interface of Trac is along these lines.
Thanks, Richard, for pointing this out.
Covet Pains that lead to Greater Gains
Friday, September 10th, 2004A guiding principle for developing collaborative culture:
“I conceive that pleasures are to be avoided if greater pains be the
consequence, and pains to be coveted that will terminate in greater
pleasures.” (Michel de Montaigne with thanks to NewsScan)
Online Collaboration has Two Humps to get over
Thursday, September 9th, 2004There are two barriers to be crossed before Online Collaboration can gain momentum: an “Access Hump” and a “Participation Hump”.
The Access Hump has to be crossed by each individual by learning to use a new technology, remembering the location, user name and password and rules of a new place. Some people refer to this as achieving ’social presence’. Hand-holding works well here.
Once the Access hump is crossed, the group has to cross the Participation Hump. This occurs as people begin to contribute and others respond. The benefits emerge from the participation and the participation occurs when people expect benefits. Structured group spaces work well here.
There is a third stage in which the participation pattern becomes complex. The back-channel and links to other groups and individuals form a self-organising and wide-ranging system. Blogs work well here.
RSS Readers: Tools for Information-Sharing or Overload?
Tuesday, September 7th, 2004Suw of Headshift says:
“the answer is not to cut down on feeds but to find a way of organising all this data more efficiently. At the moment, feed readers are like a library with no indexing, no Dewey Decimal System, and no labels on the shelves. You may like every single book in the library, but if you’re looking for information about a specific topic the lack of organisation is really going to slow you down”
Do we want all of our feeds aggregated into a single one with a variety of filters that can be applied to it?
Collaboration Software Clients
Monday, September 6th, 2004Thank you for the mention in Shared Spaces, Michael – and for the link to your white paper on Collaboration Software Clients. It accurately describes the frustrations that I experience daily as I juggle the multiple clients I use for collaboration.
I await your proposed architecture for a super-client with interest. How can such a thing achieve sufficient interoperability with server-side collaboration technologies?
Is it not more likely that persistent collaboration contexts will be constructed organically out of ad hoc connections made using heterogenous clients? The skills and administration overheads of selecting and running multiple clients are high but so is the flexibility.
Useful RSS Reader: Sage
Monday, September 6th, 2004It took me about five minutes to be converted to Sage. The first four minutes were the time it took me to download, install and configure it. An extension to Firefox (it works in Mozilla), Sage creates a panel to the left of the browser that lists RSS feeds and the titles of recent items in them. Click a feed on the left and the browser displays recent items with intros. Click an item title and browse the entire item. Such a simple way to provide four levels of detail.